Guides · How-to
How to run a virtual site survey
A virtual site survey designs and proves coverage on a model of the building — before anyone drives to site. Here is the whole workflow, from the floor plan you already have to the deliverables your customer signs.
The pass, end to end
- 01 Plan upload and anchor to scale
- 02 Model confirm walls and materials
- 03 Place devices from the product library
- 04 Compute coverage, per zone
- 05 Walk the autonomous survey flags gaps
- 06 Export the deliverables
A design-phase survey, on the model — no kit, no truck roll.
Before you start
What a virtual survey is — and what it is not
Clear expectations make the workflow below land the way it should.
A virtual site survey is the design-phase walk done on a computable model rather than on site. It exists to catch coverage problems while they are still cheap to fix — a dead corner, a camera that cannot identify at the door, a conference seat that cannot read the display — before a bracket goes on a wall.
It is not a replacement for a contractual on-site measured-validation survey where one is required. Think of it as moving the design-phase survey off the truck and onto the model: the same walk, computed instead of driven, and ready to calibrate against real readings when you have them.
The workflow
Eight steps, one model
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01
Start from the plan you actually have
A floor plan image or PDF is enough — a scan, an export, even a photo of the drawing on the wall. If the drawing is poor or missing, the adaptive basemap can draw the plan from the model itself, so a bad scan never becomes a bad design.
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02
Anchor the scale
Set real-world scale by anchoring the plan to the site. From that point on, feet on screen are feet on site — every distance, cable run, and coverage figure is measured against a plan that knows how big the building is.
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03
Confirm the walls and their materials
Walls are detected and materials suggested; you confirm or correct before anything computes. This is the step most tools skip, and it is the one that matters most — a glass wall and a concrete wall block a camera and a Wi-Fi signal very differently.
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04
Place the devices from the product library
Cameras, access points, readers, speakers, and displays come from a product library that carries the manufacturer’s specs — lens and sensor, antenna pattern, IR range, PoE draw. Place a device once and the physics, the bill of materials, and the reports all describe the same product.
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05
Read the physics
Coverage answers immediately: per-band Wi-Fi heatmaps, per-camera points of view with pixels-on-target, per-seat conference scores. Walls, glass, and racking are in the way because they are in the model — not a cone around a dot.
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06
Let the survey walk itself
The autonomous virtual site survey walks the building model on a systematic pass, probes coverage at each step the way a technician with a meter would, flags the weak spots, and proposes deterministic fixes — before anyone drives to site.
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07
Calibrate against reality when you need to
When you want ground truth, feed in measured readings from the building and the engine correlates its predictions against them. The design and the field converge on one model instead of living in two tools.
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08
Export what the customer signs
Coverage heatmaps, per-camera POV reports, print-ready multi-floor site plan sets, a design proposal, and a bill of materials — all derived from the same model, so the deliverable and the design never drift apart.
Virtual site survey questions
What is a virtual site survey?
It is a design-stage survey done on a computable model of the building instead of on site. You anchor a floor plan to real-world scale, place devices with their real specifications, and let deterministic engines compute coverage — Wi-Fi, camera, and A/V — from the geometry and the datasheets. It finds coverage problems before install, without a truck roll.
Does it replace an on-site validation survey?
For the design phase, it does the walk a survey kit used to do. It does not replace a contractual on-site measured-validation survey where one is required — that stays a separate visit. The difference is that the design no longer waits on it, and when you do measure on site, those readings calibrate the same model.
How accurate is the coverage it predicts?
It is design-stage estimation, computed from your obstacle model and manufacturer datasheets, and the platform labels it that way. Wi-Fi follows ITU-R propagation with diffraction and reflections; cameras use real lens and sensor optics with shadow casting. We do not publish accuracy-versus-measured claims we have not measured — instead, the field-calibration workflow lets you correlate against your own building.
Do I need special hardware to run one?
No. The whole point is that the design-phase survey runs on the model, not on a Sidekick-class kit and a day on site. You need a floor plan and a device list; the platform supplies the physics.
Run your next survey from your desk
Bring a floor plan and a device list — design the coverage, let the survey flag the fixes, and keep the truck in the lot. Talk to us about what your team runs.